This article forms part of the archives of Business Insider South Africa, which was published as a partnership between News24 and Insider Inc between 2018 and 2023.
- The phrase "to eat money" is now defined in the venerable Oxford English Dictionary (OED).
- Its meaning is the same as in South Africa: embezzlement or theft.
- But the OED says the phrase is currently mostly in use in Nigeria, and in East Africa.
The phrase "to eat money" has been included in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), which bills itself as "the definitive record of the English language".
For South Africans who commonly refer to especially politicians "eating the money", the OED definition will ring just about right: "to acquire money dishonestly; to misappropriate, extort, or embezzle funds".
But the apparent origin may come as a surprise. According to the dictionary, the phrase is "now chiefly Nigerian English and East African".
(OED)
The phrase was included in December 2019, as part of a list of Nigerianisms, and is linked to one meaning of "chop", which the OED says is also used in Ghana and Nigeria in relation to the theft of public money.
The dictionary cites a passage from a 1849 book,Nineveh and its remains: with an account of a visit to the Chaldæan Christian of Kurdistan, and the Yezidis, or devil-worshippers, which explains that "to eat money, i.e. to get money unlawfully or by pillage, is a common expression in the East", in reference to a supposedly common order issued by a governor of the Ottoman empire: "go, destroy, eat".
A second reference, dating from 1999, is fromThe East African Standard newspaper.
South Africa is not mentioned, although the phrase was in documented use by 1981and in 1983– albeit not in the sense of stealing public money.
It has been in use in South Africa, in the now-official sense, since at least 2001.
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